IDM PowerTips

UltraCompare ignore options

UltraCompare has powered-up it's file compare "ignore options". Have you ever compared two files and wanted to ignore a set amount of lines at the begginning/end of the file, blank lines, line terminators, etc? UltraCompare allows you to do just that!

Ignore Options

For the following example, we will take two .java files and 'ignore' the line comments starting in column 1 (or lines starting with //).

1. Open the Ignore Options dialog

UltraCompare allows you to configure ignore options in Options -> Configuration -> Ignore Options -> Text. When you navigate to this location, you should see the following dialog:

You can also configure ignore options in user profiles. Profiles are not covered in the scope of this Power Tip, however you can click here to learn more about profiles.

2. Set your options

As you can see, you have the ability to ignore the following:

Blank Lines

Case

White Space

Line Terminators

Lines which Begin With, Contain, and End With a user defined string.

Ignore a defined number of strings at the beginning/end of file

For this example, we have decided to ignore Line Terminators and Lines which begin with //, so we set the appropriate options.

3. Start your compare

Open your files for compare using the File->Open First/Second, or the quick access on the GUI.

4. View the results

Take a look at the compare, you can see that lines beginning with // are not marked as different: